THE PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY Edited by Graham Clarke THE PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY Critical Views In the same series The New Museology edited by Peter Vergo Renaissance Bodies edited by Luey Gent and Nigel Llewellyn Modernism in Design edited by Paul Greenhalgh Interpreting Contemporary Art edited by Stephen Bann and William Allen THE PORTRAIT IN PHOTOGRAPHY Edited by Graham Clarke REAKTION BOOKS Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 1-5 Midford Place, Tottenham Court Road London W1P 9HH, UK First Published 1992 Copyright © Reaktion Books Ltd 1992 Distributed in USA and Canada by the University of Washington Press, PO Box 50096, Seattle, Washington 98145-5096, USA All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Designed by Humphrey Stone Photoset by Wilmaset Ltd, Birkenhead, Wirral Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The portrait in photography. I. Clarke, Graham, 1948- 779. 2 ISBN 0-948462-29-9 ISBN 0-948462-30-2 pbk Contents Photographic Acknowledgements VI Notes on the Editor and Contributors VII Introduction Graham Clarke 1 1 Nadar and the Photographic Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France Roger Cardinal 6 2 Erased Physiognomy: Theodore Gericault, Paul Strand and Garry Winogrand Stephen Bann 25 3 Julia Margaret Cameron: A Triumph over Criticism Pam Roberts 47 4 Public Faces, Private Lives: August Sander and the Social Typology of the Portrait Photograph Graham Clarke 71 5 Duchamp's Masquerades Dawn Ades 94 6 J. P. Morgan's Nose: Photographer and Subject in American Portrait Photography Eric Homberger 115 7 Hoppe's Impure Portraits: Contextualising the American Types Mick Gidley 132 8 Images of D. H. Lawrence: On the Use of Photographs in Biography David El/is 155 9 Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique Alan Trachtenberg 173 10 The Family Photograph Album: So Great a Cloud of Witnesses Philip Stokes 193 References 206 Select Bibliography 222 Index 225 Photographic Acknowledgements The editor and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Aperture Foundation, Inc., and the Paul Strand Archive (© 1952) p. 14; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris pp. 12, 14, 16, 17; Birmingham Local Studies Library pp. 199, 202; John Carswell p. 167; Dulwich Picture Gallery p. 36; Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, Chippenham, Wilts. p. 35; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and The Estate of Garry Winogrand p. 37; Richard Hoppe p. 134; Matthew Isenburg pp. 179,182,183 (top and bottom); Man Ray Trust, Paris pp. 101, 104, 105, 108; Mansell Collection, London pp. 19,135,141,149,151,154; Ministere de la Justice, Service de I'Identification Judicaire, Brussels p. 161; Kodak Collection, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television p. 200; Royal Photographic Society, Bath pp. 57,58,61,65, 67,68,69,117; Service photographique de la Reunion des musees nationaux, Paris pp. 34, 4 2. Notes on the Editor and Contributors GRAHAM CLARKE is a Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent, where he also teaches American Studies and a course on the photograph. His publications include The American City - Literary and Cultural Perspectives (ed., 1988), The New American Writing (ed., 1990), and Wait Whitman: The Poem as Private History (1991), as well as critical editions of T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James. His writing on photography includes essays on the daguerreotype, Don McCullin, Alfred Stieglitz, and post-war American photographers. He is currently completing a book on Alfred Stieglitz and New York City. ROGER CARDINAL has written widely on French Surrealism and German Expressionism, and is the author of an essay on the modern poetic imagination, 'Figures of Reality' (1981), and of The Landscape Vision ofPaul Nash (Reaktion Books, 1989). An international authority on Art Brut, on which he wrote the first book, Outsider Art (1972), he is currently preparing for Reaktion Books a wide­ ranging survey of marginal creativity, The Primitive. He is Professor of Literary and Visual Studies at the University of Kent. STEPHEN BANN is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies and Chairman of the Board of Studies in History and Theory of Art at the University of Kent. His books include Concrete Poetry - An International Anthology (ed., 1967), Experimental Painting (1970), The Tradition ofConstructivism (ed., 1974), The Clothing of Clio (1984), The True Vine (1989), and The Inventions of History (1990). He recently co-edited, with William Alien, Interpreting Contemporary Art (Reaktion Books, 1991). PAM ROBERTS is currently Curator of the Royal Photographic Society, Bath. She has published essays on a wide range of photographic subjects, including 40ur Photographic Legacy' (1989), 4Madame Yevonde: Colour, Fantasy and Myth' (1990), and the introduction to Whisper of the Muse: The World of ]ulia Margaret Cameron (exhibition catalogue, 1990). She has curated numerous photographic exhibitions, including the work of Cecil Beaton, Frederick Evans, Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Madame Yevonde, and (most recently) the retrospective exhibition of Don McCullin. Vlll NOTES ON THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS DAWN ADES is Professor of Art History at the University of Essex. She has published widely on art history and criticism, including Dada and Surrealism Renewed (1978), Photomontage (1976), Dali (1982), Francis Bacon (1985), and the Hayward Gallery exhibition catalogue Art in Latin America: the Modern Era, 1820-1980 (1989). ERIC HOMBERGER is Reader in American Literature at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and is the author of The Art ofthe Real: Poetry in England and America since 1939 (1977), American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-1939: Equivocal Commitments (1986), John LeCarre (1986), John Reed (biography, 1990); he has also edited Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (1972), The Troubled Face ofBiography (1988) and John Reed and the Russian Revolution (1992). MICK GIDLEY, Director of AmCAS at the University of Exeter, has been awarded fellowships by the ACLS, the British Academy and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. His publications include essays in American cultural history, three illustrated books on Native Americans, A Catalogue ofAmerican Paintings in British Public Collections (1974), a BAAS pamphlet, American Photography (1983), and, as co-editor, Views of American Landscapes (1989). DAVID ELLIS is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent. His publications include Wordsworth, Freud, and the Spots of Time: Interpretation in the Prelude (1985), and (with Howard Mills) D. H. Lawrence's Non-fiction (1988). He has written widely on the nature of biography and is currently completing the third volume of the new Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence. ALAN TRACHTENBERG is the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He was a Fulbright lecturer in Leningrad and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences in Stanford, California, and of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. Alan Trachtenberg is the author of Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965), The Incorporation of America: Society and Culture in the Gilded Age (1982), and Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989). PHI LIP STOKES is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, Nottingham Polytechnic. His publications include 'Trails of Topographic Notions' in Views of American Landscapes (1989), 'Photography as Cultural Nexus: Edward Cahen, his photographs, family and friends', in Photoresearcher (vol. I, no. I, 1990), the catalogue for the exhibition held at Editions Graphiques Gallery, Clifford Street, London (1990) entitled Exhibition of Photographs by Ruralists and Friends, and a selection of essays in Contemporary Masterworks, ed. Colin Naylor (1992). Introduction GRAHAM CLARKE The portrait photograph exists within a series of seemingly endless paradoxes. Indeed, as the formal representation of a face or body it is, by its very nature, enigmatic. And part of·this enigma is embedded in the nature of identity as itself ambiguous, for the portrait advertises an individual who endlessly eludes the single, static and fixed frame of a public portrait. In this sense, the very terms of the portrait photograph's status are problematic. The earliest portrait photographs, most notably the daguerreotype, insisted on their realism; they were literally mirror­ images of those photographed. In making an image of an individual, these early photographs took their place within the wider tradition of the portrait painting. Yet, ironically, the portrait photograph achieved its dissemination at the very moment when painting, like literature, began to question the basis of mimetic representation. The great twentieth-century portraitists: Picasso, Bacon, Giacometti, and Sutherland, for example, have all attempted to image the individual in direct contrast to the 'real' world, as seemingly represented by the photograph. As an analogue of the original subject, the portrait photograph surreptitiously declares itself as the trace of the person (or personality) before the eye. In an official context, the photograph validates identity: be it on a passport, driving licence, or form.